Hacker News Reader

Comment by qsymmachus | Hacker News Reader

That's a good point, but I think it would be a shame if wireless charging completely replaced wired, because it's much less efficient.

Something like 20-40% of input energy is wasted when using wireless charging versus a wire. If every existing phone switched to wireless charging, that would cause a non-trivial increase in total power usage.

View on HN

Not saying it's entirely unrelevant, but when looking at energy consumption by production and by usage of smartphones, the usage basically consumes no energy at all (https://imgur.com/VHpJ5et).

That is probably because batteries can hold a very limited amount of energy and therefore mobile software is developed to use very little electricity.

But on the other hand, less energy efficient chargers wont help this. I just mean it's not the big problem about our smartphones energy consumption.

Sorry, meant co2 emissions, not energy use.

Ahh because these two are decoupled. I am sure smartphone usage contributes a significant portion to CO2 then.

    > therefore mobile software is developed to
    > use very little electricity.

I see that you're _not_ in the mobile dev industry! Power consumption is the type of thing that is talked about in prerelease mobile software, and removed from the bullet points during release. Nobody optimizes for power consumption at the expense of features, bugs, or developer time.

Perhaps an acceptable trade off for the substantial reduction in e-waste. You can always generate more clean power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com